The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, the approaches described in this section may not be prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
The ability to communicate with other computer systems was not considered and fully provided for when mainframe computers were initially designed. It is therefore difficult for outside computer systems (such as, for example, client or server systems) to monitor the activity in mainframe computers, even though an outside computer system may benefit from knowing what happens in a mainframe computer in response to tasks submitted to the mainframe computer by the outside computer system.
One example of such outside computer system is a software configuration management server. In general, a server is a combination of integrated software components and an allocation of computational resources (e.g., memory, CPU time, and/or disk storage space) for executing the software components. By utilizing its allocated resources, a configuration management server is operable to control and manage software project development by supporting various development functionalities including, without limitation, versioning of project files, providing components for building executable project files, and controlling access to project files.
Because of the design limitations of mainframe computers, it is difficult for configuration management servers to support a full scale of development functionalities for software programs and projects that are developed on mainframe computers. For example, a configuration management server cannot monitor the activities that occur on a mainframe computer while a build of a software program is being generated at the mainframe computer. As a result, the configuration management server may not be capable of facilitating an efficient execution of builds on the mainframe computer or may even not be able to control the execution of builds on the mainframe computer at all.